To Be Some Other Name: The Naming Games that Hijras Play

Abstract

Although the hijras appear as a generic category in much official and scholarly discourse that renders them as the 'third gender,' members of these communities themselves pay close attention to the multiple criteria through which one hijra body might be distinguished from another. 1 This kind of differentiation is reiterated in common talk among the hijras and relates to the moral economy of izzat, 2 or honor. Of the multiple signs through which hijras make their bodies and their sexuality apparent in both the public domain and in interpersonal relations, proper names play a significant role in marking the place of the hijras in the wider sexual economy and also for indexing the changes in the status of a particular person through the life course. From the outside, it might appear that the boundaries of the hijra community are well-defined but from the inside, the community is haunted by questions about who is an asli (real/true) hijra and who might be a nakli or false one (false in the sense of an impostor or a duplicate which carries with it a moral charge of cheating). Distinctions are made through reading very closely the multiple alterations of bodies through surgical and medical interventions, the movement between names, and the volatility of relations in which different subcommunities of hijras are implicated, for differentiating hijra bodies and selves. In this volatile play of who one is, questions about asli and nakli are not simply about social identities but about one's existence as genuine or fake. 2 This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2008 and 2010 intermittently and then without any break for a further period between 2011 and 2013 amongst hijra groups in three rural districts of Orissa-Bhadrak, Jajpur, and Kalahandi. Before my fieldwork in Orissa, I belonged to the community of sexual minorities in Calcutta that organized various public events demanding recognition from the state. This is how I first came to register the mutual suspicion among hijras about who is a true hijra. For instance, Shonali, a hijra guru in Bhadrak, did not consider the other hijras of Bhadrak asli (genuine) because they were married to women, 3 while hijras in Jajpur did not consider any of the hijras of the Bhadrak, including Shonali, asli because, while they

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